Author: Anna

Etsy provides a fascinating look at a company who found traction among a very passionate and idealistic group of people, rode that wave to massive growth and an IPO and now must find growth through decisions often at odds with the beliefs of its earliest members. In this growth study, we look at how they did it in the early days, the decisions and dynamics of their business that allowed them to scale, and the company’s efforts to keep finding the new growth lever. The challenge for Etsy, now a public company with a $2 billion valuation, is to find the growth that public markets demand while doing its best to hold on to the users who made them successful in the first place. Author’s Note: A special thanks to Shana Carp for her oral history of the company’s early traction in the feminist craft community. Her feedback and insights were invaluable in creating this growth study.

Not so long ago, websites were purely used to deliver product and services information to target customers…

But they have morphed into a point-of-sales platform where businesses leverage their website for sales. Selling products or services on websites has become de rigueur and most businesses have jumped on board this money spinner of an idea, and why not? With consumers doing most of their shopping online, it makes perfect business sense to ensure your products and/or services are sold on your website.

Since businesses began seeing their website as a sales tool, another realization dawned upon them – their website is also a great marketing machine. Building a website is not only about ensuring your brand reaches a wider audience, but also about making sure that this audience is convinced about the merits of the products or services of your brand and persuaded to buy them.

Yes, your website can be turned into a lean mean marketing machine. The kind that drives not just online sales but offline sales as well!

Chatbots can be very useful even though they sometimes fail and make us laugh or generate frustration. I’m pretty sure you’ve had both good and awkward experiences with chatbots as well. Some people say that chatbots aren’t fully capable of replacing human beings in a normal conversation yet.

Even if it’s true that conversational bots still need to be able to fully encrypt the different facets of our language to become fully efficient and pass a superficial Turing test, they’re nonetheless pretty useful when it comes to customer support.

There are plenty of different applications for bots. For example, they’re quite practical in messenger apps and can be deployed to take an order or quickly respond to a customer in a Facebook chat or to resolve an issue via live chat on a website without human intervention.

AdWords Expanded Text Ads must be AB split tested. This guide will tell you how to AB test these new expanded ads and how this differs from your current AB testing methods. AdWords has released Expanded Text Ads to all accounts, we are now left to look at our data and determine which creative options will work best. But how?<